The Pitch That Killed Ray Chapman...

Carl Mays
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Ray Chapman
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99 years ago, this past August 16th, 1920, Carl Mays, an irascible and widely despised pitcher, for the NY Yankees threw a pitch that would kill the affable and popular Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians and change Major League Baseball forever.

It remains the ONLY lethal pitch ever thrown in Major League baseball.

In the Summer of 1920, the Indians, Yankees and White Sox were all vying for the American League pennant.

The Yankees had the great "Bambino" (Babe Ruth), the Indians were led by the legendary Tris Speaker ("The Grey Eagle"), and the White Sox, with Shoeless Joe Jackson had won the previous year's World Series (the infamous "Black Sox Scandal" had yet to break).

On this day in 1920, the Yankees, then trailing the Indians by just half a game, hosted Cleveland in the Polo Grounds in New York.

On the mound for the Yankees was their ace Carl Mays. As noted, Mays was an ornery and much despised, right-handed submarine pitcher whose contorted, underhand motion was so extreme that his knuckles would sometimes touched the turf while throwing a pitch.

In the fifth inning, Chapman a 29-year-old newlywed with a daughter on the way, led off the fifth inning for his second at-bat of the game. Mays’ third pitch to Chapman was a fastball high and tight. The pitch sailed slightly up and in, toward Chapman's head. Chapman froze as the ball slammed into his left temple.

The pitch was met with a loud crack that resounded throughout the ballpark and the ball dribbled slowly back toward Mays, who fielded it and threw to Yankee first baseman Wally Pipp.

Mays watched as Pipp caught the ball, then froze, when he turned and looked toward home plate.

That was the first moment Mays and others in the ballpark realized the crack they’d heard wasn't Chapman’s bat.

Chapman had crumpled to the turf. He'd attempt to walk to the center field clubhouse under his own power, but he'd barely make it past second base before collapsing again.

Ray Chapman would die from his injuries 12 hours later in a New York City hospital at the age of 29.

As players and men, Mays and Chapman couldn't have been more different, something that made their fateful encounter even more powerful in the public’s imagination. As Mike Sowell detailed in "The Pitch That Killed," Mays was probably the most unpopular player in the game at the time, even more despised than the notoriously mercurial Ty Cobb.

Mays was a moody loner both on and off the field whom teammates likened to someone with a perpetually nagging toothache. On the mound, he was a fierce competitor, whose reputation for being a “headhunter” put him among the league leaders in hit batsmen.

In one game against the aforementioned Ty Cobb, Mays threw at the Detroit Tigers legend every time he came to the plate, and Cobb reciprocated by hurling his bat at Mays.

The widely disliked Carl Mays often yelled at his own fielders when they'd make an error, and once even beaned a heckling fan in the stands.

Chapman, on the other hand, was extremely well-liked by both players and fans. Before the season, the infielder had married the daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman who was eager for his son-in-law to retire from his "low-paying, itinerant job" and join the family business.

Chapman was considered by many to be the best shortstop in the league at the time and someone who was unusually good at the plate, in an era when the Shortstop was primarily regarded as a defensive position.

Unfortunately, Chapman also stood unusually close to the plate and often hunched over it — in a period some 50 years before batting helmets were mandated.

“His head was in the strike zone,” Muddy Ruel, the Yankees catcher on that fateful day, told a reporter years later, and whether it was the fog hanging over the field, that day the dirty, nearly brown baseball covered with tobacco juice, or something else, by all accounts Chapman barely moved as Mays’ pitch exploded into the side of his head.

Ruel tried to catch Chapman as he collapsed, while the home-plate umpire called for a doctor, and the stricken batter was helped from the field.

At St. Lawrence Hospital, doctors found a fracture on the left side of Chapman’s skull that was more than 3 inches long, and his brain had lacerations on both sides from slamming into the sides of his skull. Doctors operated into the night, but shortly before sunrise, Chapman died.

Chapman's death remains the only fatality caused by an in-game injury in Major League Baseball history, and it had widespread ramifications for how the sport was played afterwards.

When his pregnant widow was greeted with the news as she stepped from the train in New York, she passed out.

Mays was so distraught, upon hearing the news, that he pledged to surrender himself to the Manhattan District Attorney.

Despite Mays’ reputation as a headhunter, most observers felt that he had not been aiming at Chapman, given the fact that the Yankees were trailing in a game with pennant implications, and the death was ruled accidental, but the accident would haunt Mays until his own death in 1971 at the age of 79. The incident would cast a long, dark shadow over a career in which Mays racked up a 207-126, with a 2.92 ERA in 15 seasons, which remains among the best numbers for a pitcher NOT in the Hall of Fame.

The Cleveland Indians would recover and go on to win their first World Series, making franchise history that fall, in honor of their fallen shortstop.

Beginning the following season, Major League Baseball instituted new rules, one of which required new balls be introduced into games more regularly to ensure that they didn’t become too dirty to see.

Of course, easier-to-spot balls were also easier to hit. So Chapman’s death, along with the elimination of the spitball and the rise of a certain home-run-hitting slugger named Babe Ruth, would help usher in the so-called "live-ball era" of the modern game, in which higher-scoring contests with more home runs would electrify a new generation of fans, helping to reclaim the sport from the taint of the Black Sox scandal and the devastation of what remains its only on-field fatality.

Horrifyingly, Ray Chapman's death would also devastate his family. Neither his widow, nor his young daughter would survive the 1920s.

As a youngster, his daughter, Rae Marie was described by her uncle, Dan Daly, as “an active child who was very musical. She liked to sing and dance. And she was quite clever in school.”

Rae Marie was just two years old when her mother remarried.

Kathleen’s second husband was a cousin of hers — Joseph F. McMahon, a California oil man. The couple had one son and named him Joseph McMahon, Jr.

It had taken Kathleen a long time to recover from Ray’s death, and her family hoped that her new marriage would help her regain the happiness she'd once known.

But on April 21st, 1928, at the age of thirty-four, Kathleen died suddenly in California, under highly controversial circumstances.

The version recounted by the Daly family was that Mrs. Daly had gone to Los Angeles to accompany Kathleen on a trip to Hawaii. The trunks were already packed and ready to go when Kathleen, who had not been in good health, returned to the bedroom to take some medication. A few moments later, she suddenly called out, “Oh, Mother!” Mrs. Daly rushed in to discover Kathleen lying on the floor.

According to Mrs. Daly, her daughter had gotten the bottles mixed up and accidentally poisoned herself.

“The medicine was in the cabinet, but she took a bottle of something else - cleaning fluid or something that looked the same,” Dan Daly would claim, years later. He added, “In her weakened condition, it was just enough to kick her over the line.”

However, the Cleveland newspapers attributed Kathleen’s death to a “self-administered poisonous acid.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that she'd recently returned from a hospital where “she had attempted to recover from a nervous breakdown.” A copy of the coroner’s report attached to an insurance form sent to Chapman’s mother also listed the cause of death as suicide.

Following Kathleen’s death, young Rae Marie returned to Cleveland to live with her grandparents, but that Winter, there was a measles outbreak in the city, so the Daly family sent the child to Florida to prevent her from catching the disease.

Despite the precautions, Rae Marie contracted the measles shortly after returning to Cleveland the following April.

Complications set in, and Chapman’s daughter, only eight years old, died on April 27th, 1929, just six days shy of the first anniversary of her mother’s death.

There was one other notation to the young girl’s death. The nurse who cared for Rae Marie said that one day in Florida, the youngster told her, “I was talking to my mother last night.”

“You mean Mrs. Daly?” asked the nurse.

“No, no. I mean my real mother.”

Not knowing what to say, the nurse could only answer, “Oh.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rae Marie. “She talks to me once in a while. And she told me I’ll be with her soon."

For years the date of Ray Chapman's death seemed to remain snakebit. On August 16th, 1948 Baseball legend Babe Ruth would die in NY at the age of 53.

After 1920, Cleveland would not win a World Series again until 1948.

They have yet to win a 3rd one.
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